While there are lots of good points, I'd like to point out something that many people overlook: winning by remembering your own triggers and taking advantage of opponents who miss their own is NOT wrong. Let me try to explain.

In the past few days I have seen phrases like “…weasel a win…” and “…subterfuge…” and others like it when referring to calling out the fact that an opponent has missed a trigger. These phrases imply that doing so is inappropriate or wrong, but you need to be careful. We are discussing whether or not such things are wrong, and if you define them as wrong by assuming that they are (i.e. by using the phrases), then you are begging the question - logical fallacy.

However, the IPG ENCOURAGES players to call opponents out on missed triggers, and in many cases that we discuss, the situations can easily deprive players of the opportunity to do so. If we say that they can do it, then we start making exceptions at the table when they do it, we are opening ourselves up to exactly the kind of problems we are now encountering. The problems don't happen too often, but they do happen.

Everyone agrees that weaseling a win is bad, but we don't all agree on what constitutes weaseling a win. In this Pyreheart Wolf scenario, powerful arguments have been made that if B has to ask “Is the stack empty?” or “Can I block?”, he loses an edge that is created when the opponent forgets the trigger (notice I don't say that the opponent has forgotten it, but he might have). If you start by calling his action “weaseling”, you have already concluded your argument without supporting your opinion. That's problematic (obviously, since we are discussing it), because the IPG grants to player B the right to let his opponent miss triggers.

So, I would suggest that we keep focused on WHY we think it's weaseling or WHY we think it's ok. Support opinions with logic about the pro's and con's, or the probabilities, or the community's perception. You'll find solid arguments for both sides in many of the posts. Defining an action as subterfuge in order to show that it is subterfuge is a questionable logic.

Eric Shukan
Woburn, MA USA

Well I'll give my own personal answer since “weaselling” or not seems very subjective.

I don't believe magic is a game of “gotcha” and I don't think I'm the only one. To call “gotcha” on a technicality in the rules is weaselly in my opinion. In specific, the Craterhoof Behemoth scenario feels very much like a gotcha. The win was on the board, everyone knows what was intended, but the game becomes hung up on procedure. To try to lawyer your way out of a loss there feels weaselly to me in every way.

On Fri Dec 14 00:06, Adam Zakreski wrote:
> Well I'll give my own personal answer since “weaselling” or not seems very subjective.
>
> I don't believe magic is a game of “gotcha” and I don't think I'm the only one. To call “gotcha” on a technicality in the rules is weaselly in my opinion. In specific, the Craterhoof Behemoth scenario feels very much like a gotcha. The win was on the board, everyone knows what was intended, but the game becomes hung up on procedure. To try to lawyer your way out of a loss there feels weaselly to me in every way.

Yeah, people have said before that the new rules eliminate the ‘gotcha’ of not noticing your opponent's exalted creatures. However, it has introduced the new ‘gotcha’ of ‘well, you didn’t indicate the trigger' even if they clearly (from actions post-hoc) expected it to have happenned.

No One has yet addressed my concern around static buffs vs no-visual-effect triggers (they sure feel similar, yet your actions to have them apply have to be different). I don't care if the ‘you missed it’ handling is different in the VE trigger vs VE static effect case for _missed_ triggers, because the actions your perform in the case where you have remembered are the same, which is what players have to deal with

Matt

Again, some of this response shows exactly my point. All of us agree on the first two sentences and also on the last one. None of these sentences has to do with the core discussion, though. The discussion isn't about “Is ‘gotcha’ good or bad?”

Rather, the discussion is about what constitutes “gotcha” according to the IPG. Toward that discussion, the response below provides sentences 3 and 4, which are excellent.

The key is that the IPG for MT now says that calling opponents out on MT's is legal. So, to a large degree, we are enabling a form of “gotcha” then stifling the enablement with exceptions. The real questions should be: where does the issue turn away from MT into a lack of communication, and how do we deteremine that vague turning point, and do we need to address this in the IPG?

Sentences 3 and 4 address some of those questions, which is a good thing. Sentences 1,2, and 5 just say that rules lawyering is bad, which we already agree on and which adds nothing to determining how to recognize rules lawyering in the context of the MT policy.

-Eric
—– Original Message —–
I don't believe magic is a game of “gotcha” and I don't think I'm the only one. To call “gotcha” on a technicality in the rules is weaselly in my opinion. In specific, the Craterhoof Behemoth scenario feels very much like a gotcha. The win was on the board, everyone knows what was intended, but the game becomes hung up on procedure. To try to lawyer your way out of a loss there feels weaselly to me in every way.

I play like we do at our kitchen table: everybody point out everyone's triggers. Why?

Because winning by playing a game of Magic is the correct way to win. Nowhere in the CR does it say one can miss one's triggers. Therefore, it cannot happen. You can't “forget” to go to Jail playing Monopoly and landing on the square can you?

More relevant to Magic: can I “miss a trigger” playing MtGO? Why not? Why isn't this functionality supported? I don't play it, so I assume (and please do correct me if I'm wrong) there are triggers and they cannot be missed. If this is the case, why can they be allowed to be missed at all?

The IPG tries to deal with faulty play. That there is an algorithm for a missed trigger in the IPG lets me know this is erroneous play. That it has changed considerably in the last couple years lets me know the intent is not always clear.

I personally prefer that all triggers are assumed to happen when they should, and if the trigger doesn't kind of automatically work (like exalted) then you explicitly state it. Again, this is equally sloppy since a forgotten trigger by the controller being correctly applied by the opponent feels like a real bad time for competitive play (and a reason I don't frequently play competitively).

Having said that, I really like the policy as it is currently; it seems the most intuitive for competitive play. I hope it remains as is.

And I have won games in competitive play by not pointing out missed triggers. And I think that's not winning by playing a game of Magic, that's winning by exploiting a violation of the CR allowed by the IPG. I don't use the IPG when not playing or judging Comp REL, so so dealing with missed triggers looks more like “does it say ‘may’? Then you missed it. If not, and within a turn cycle? Then do it now applied as though it happened when it should have.” Seems to work after applying this for the last 18 years of my card playing.

Thanks for entertaining my comments?

-Matt Sauers
L1, Indianapolis

I see multiple propositions that protects the player that communicate
poorly, trying to give him a strategical advantage anyway, putting the
burden of clarification or potential strategical disadvantage to his
opponent. I dislike those propositions for that reason.
Sure, the opponent could ask for clarification. Doing so without
telegraphing his own plays is not easy or even always doable (specially if
it involves objects currently in an hidden zone). Communicating poorly and
forcing opponents to disclose strategic information in order to clarify the
situation shouldn't happen.
We should never reward or encourage unclear communication when it leaves a
room for reasonable doubt. If an opponent if not sure if the trigger has
been missed or not, as a rule of thumb, it likely has been missed.
For this reason, I have no problem with a player missing his Wolf or
Behemoth trigger because he didn't communicate clearly about them. We don't
want to promote bad communication, nor penalize opponents of sloppy players.

- Emilien

2012/12/14 Eric Shukan <forum-2235@apps.magicjudges.org>

Originally posted by Eric Shukan:

The real questions should be: where does the issue turn away from MT into a lack of communication, and how do we determine that vague turning point, and do we need to address this in the IPG?

Citing both examples from the article, they seem to be lack of communication between two players, or rather, un-communication (if that's even a word), than missed triggers.
On one end of the table sits a player who's well aware of what his/her cards do, and their triggers. On the other end of the table sits another player who's also well aware, but chooses not to communicate by determining the current game state before taking action.
Be it a simple “Anything else?” for Pyreheart Wolf or a confirmation of “OK?”/“Are you going to your attack?” after the opponent has successfully cast Craterhoof Behemoth or any equivalent would have sufficed without giving out too much information in my opinion.
That, to me, is already sufficient communication on the receiving player's end to ensure that the game state is clear enough for him/her to proceed.
I do believe that most events have announcements that explicitly state that “you need to announce your triggers clearly”, so players are further reminded of this issue.
I think the emphasis has to be put on communication leading to a clear game/board state, which actually applies to every single item in the M:tG, not only IPG/MT.

Matt Sauers
I play like we do at our kitchen table: everybody point out everyone's triggers. Why?

Because winning by playing a game of Magic is the correct way to win. Nowhere in the CR does it say one can miss one's triggers. Therefore, it cannot happen. You can't “forget” to go to Jail playing Monopoly and landing on the square can you?

Not sure exactly how you guys play at your table apart from the triggers, but wouldn't that be just like what the JAR says: to point out everyone's triggers?
I do agree that nowhere in the CR does it state that one is allowed to miss his/her triggers. However, that, I believe, is why there's the Infraction Procedure Guide - to deal with infractions of the rules - and the infraction here is missing out on a trigger.

Just a curious and probably ignorant side question on the article posted, why isn't the Pyromancer Ascension + Gitaxian Probe issue OOS as per MTR4.3? The opponent did indicate the awareness of the trigger at the end, and the final state was legal. Is it because of the new MT policy overriding OOS?

So, first off I think “gotcha” is the wrong way to look at this.

Nobody seems to mind the idea that if you just plain forget your trigger, it's gone. We've been doing that, in one form or another, for years. What people seem to mind is how we handle cases of poor communication, where there is awareness of the trigger but no effective communication of its existence or resolution. The whole “gotcha” discussion boils down to the cases of “well, I know that you have this trigger, and you know you have this trigger, and I know that you know that you have this trigger, but you still won't get the trigger unless you do X, and I'll call a judge if you don't.”

And it's important to note that those cases aren't terribly common. With Pyreheart Wolf, I don't think anybody plans to knowingly allow an illegal block without saying something, for example. So interrupting the attempt to declare blockers should be perfectly fine (and I'd argue that under the IPG as currently written, it is perfectly fine, and if judges think it isn't then that's a point of education to work on). Similarly, most of the time someone who casts a Craterhoof Behemoth is going to be doing something – whether tallying up their creatures, or figuring out just how much total trampling power they've got – that makes the trigger's existence clear. This is just how real games of Magic naturally play out most of the time, and moving policy in that direction is what we ought to aim for.

So what about those cases where somebody is aware of the trigger but doesn't do anything to demonstrate that? We have two questions to answer here:

1. Whose responsibility is it if there's poor communication about something going onto the stack or resolving?
2. Where can we draw a line that enforces that responsibility appropriately?

For (1), it used to be the opponent's responsibility; opponents were just supposed to notice the “obvious” triggers, like exalted, and you could take advantage of an opponent who didn't. Now it's the controller's responsibility; you're supposed to communicate, in some fashion, about even the most “obvious” trigger, and an opponent can take advantage of you if you don't.

That's a major shift in responsibility. Is it the right place to put the responsibility? Well, it's certainly consistent with everything else that uses the stack (exception for silver-bordered land, where Cheatyface puts responsibility on the opponent). And generally, if we want the game to go smoothly, we should put the responsibility for ensuring that on the person who's likely to benefit from it happening (i.e., the controller of the trigger, who has an interest in seeing it resolve correctly). So on both counts, this is probably the right way to do it.

But (2) is where it gets tricky: where do we put the line, such that past that line an opponent can know, absolutely, whether or not the trigger has happened? We want to avoid a couple of pitfalls here: first, we don't want to turn Magic into a game of reflexes (as it unfortunately was, in some ways, with lapsing triggers). But we also don't want to let an ambiguous situation go on too long, since that way lie even worse problems.

So we need some kind of middle ground: give people a little bit of time to do the bare-minimum communication, since we're all human and we want to play at a natural pace. But not too much time, since we don't want to be arguing further down the line about whether the trigger happened.

The current IPG's line basically boils down to looking at whether the controller of the trigger has done something that indicates the game has moved on past the trigger. And that's not bad, as lines in the sand go. It means that if you start trying to declare blockers, and I point out my Pyreheart Wolf, then Pyreheart Wolf's trigger isn't missed, so that's the most-often-cited card solved right there. Craterhoof Behemoth is trickier, for the specific case where you just go straight into declaring attackers without any acknowledgement of the trigger first. I'm not sure whether that's acceptable collateral damage (since it's really not any kind of huge burden to just point to the Behemoth or whatever before you start turning things sideways) in order to get basically everything else in Standard to work naturally, but it's worth thinking about.

The big issue seems to be arguments about how technical the IPG's definition is, or how it interacts with other bits of policy like out-of-order sequencing. Personally I'd like to keep the IPG as non-technical as possible here; even the current language is getting a bit too strict. If the goal (and I think this is the goal) really is for a trigger to be missed once it's clear the controller has done something that shows the game's moved on, then just let that be the definition; trying to codify it in terms of “active” priority passes, or an opponent trying to bait out “what's on the stack” without actually saying that, or whatever, just removes the ability to use common sense and moves us into games of words and reflexes rather than games of cards and skill. OoOS also shouldn't get thrown out the window (and isn't, currently, which is perhaps another point of education).

And speaking of opponents trying to find out if you've missed without bringing up the trigger: I don't really worry too much about that, and treat it as an irrelevant aside to the real discussion. You don't have a responsibility to point out someone else's trigger, but that's not the same as having a right to always play in a way that doesn't remind someone else about a trigger. And getting a common-sense line drawn in the IPG removes most of that anyway, since it'll be obvious when a trigger's missed or not, without feeling like you need to carefully word your questions to avoid reminding someone about a trigger.

On Fri Dec 14 02:19, Eric Shukan wrote:
> Again, some of this response shows exactly my point. All of us agree on the first two sentences and also on the last one. None of these sentences has to do with the core discussion, though. The discussion isn't about “Is ‘gotcha’ good or bad?”
>
> Rather, the discussion is about what constitutes “gotcha” according to the IPG. Toward that discussion, the response below provides sentences 3 and 4, which are excellent.

No, it's about “which form of gotcha would we like the IPG to allow”. (The ideal being ‘none’, but we don't have that as an option at the moment)

Matt

This answers a lot of my questions…

http://blogs.magicjudges.org/telliott/2012/12/14/out-of-order-sequencing-and-triggers/

What I like about the current missed trigger rules, is that if a player forgets a beneficial trigger, they won't get the effect. The opponent is no longer forced to remember them.

The problems that seem to come up mainly involve situations where it's obvious that the player didn't forget his trigger, but failed to communicate about it. On one hand, I don't really mind players getting burned for that (clear communication is extremely important!) but on the other hand, it doesn't really feel right to tell a player who was continuously aware of his trigger that he forgot.

Also considering how often judges call PCV incorrectly, I think it might be beneficial to have the ability to rewind in the case of unclear or missing communication, retaining the current missed trigger rules for the situation where the player actually forgot the trigger when it should have happened. This would require judges to use their judgement to determine if the trigger was forgotten or unannounced, though.

What I find helpful is to rename the infraction to “Unannounced Trigger”, even if only internally.

This solves situations where a player didn't announce, even though perfectly aware of the trigger.

I agree with James that this is not actually a trigger problem, it's a communication problem. Like he said, no one has had a problem with not getting a trigger that they missed, but there is a feel bad moment when a player knows they have a trigger and don't get it because it wasn't announced properly.

Sneaky players are going to try and be sneaky. Whether it's by trying to hide their triggers until too late for an opponent to do anything about them or by trying to trick an opponent into missing a trigger, people who want to game the system are going to try to game the system. So whether the original rules “encouraged” people to hide Noble Hierarchs in an attempt to trick or not is irrelevant to the discussion of the missed trigger rule.

I probably feel differently about this than a lot of you because I'm a player first and a judge second. Judging is fine, but it's not as satisfying as playing. So I'd like to share my perspective

I don't like the current iteration of the trigger rules. I can't recall ever missing an opponent's exalted trigger or other NVE trigger. And while occasionally having to point out an NVE trigger an opponent missed sucked (hey, your guy is actually a 4/5, not a 3/4), it sucks a lot less than having to announce all those triggers myself. It really bogs down the game. Judges hate shortcuts, viewing them as a necessary evil because judges are looking for correct technical play. Players love shortcuts because automating less interesting parts of the game allows us to spend more time on the parts of the game we actually enjoy. So pointing out an opponent's missed NVE trigger once every other tournament or so is a lot less frustrating than pointing out 100-200 triggers of my own every tournament.

Even with all that being said, If the issue was simply one of retraining myself to announce triggers that I've spent the last dozen years not announcing, I'd be ok with that. I'll probably grumble a bit, but then again, Magic players can and will gripe about absolutely anything. I feel the current iteration of the rule is unintuitive but that's because I've spent a dozen years and change with NVE just being a thing. I can adjust to that.

What really concerns me isn't the way this policy works with the majority of triggers. It does slow down the flow of the game and that can be a concern (see Sensei's Divining Top in Extended/Modern), but the biggest problem is the way it interacts with certain triggers. Delayed triggers like Jace 4.0. Triggers you would normally only communicate about when they're relevant, such as Desecration Demon. If these triggers were on cards that were unplayable in tournament Magic or if Wizards was going to avoid printing more cards with these kinds of triggers, the current rules would be acceptable, if onerous. But it's a little silly to say that if you don't announce your Desecration Demon trigger the turn it comes into play, you're cheating. While I would imagine most judges wouldn't actually hand out the DQ on an unannounced DD trigger, not giving the DQ would be a deviation from the rules as written. We don't want rules that are so unwieldy that judges are ignoring them; that defeats the entire point of having a rule. And this isn't just a corner case. These are cards that are highly playable in limited and/or constructed.

However, I don't think that there should be any changes to the current rules. The rules have changed twice recently and another change would simply be confusing for players and decrease their confidence in judges in general. I think it would create a “why can't these guys get their stuff together?” feeling in the player base.

Originally posted by Mike Torrisi:

Judges hate shortcuts

Actually, I'd counter that judges LOVE shortcuts (because they can shorten the event!), but we hate it when shortcuts are assumed, instead of clearly communicated.

And that seems like a fair generalization, because miscommunication between players often leads to the most difficult situations for judges to untangle.

As for triggers - it's tricky; let's agree that we probably can't write a policy that everyone will love. The current stance leans towards less-competitive players; you can't hope your opponent misses your triggers and makes a bad play. That's also a significant change from previous iterations. Is it perfect? No, of course not. Is it better than before? Well, we hoped so, or we wouldn't have written it like that. Is it “right”, or even close enough to call it “final”? Probably not.

It's disappointing to think that players see this as “can't get it together”; it might seem like we're following the Wal-Mart quality control process (sell it, let them tell us if it's ‘bad’). In reality, there are dozens of people involved - all very well-versed in both policy and actual game play - and we even include Wizards' R&D. Literally, policy is the result of many of the game's “best minds”.

So, is there a better way to craft and then thoroughly test policy? None that we've found. Policy is hard, m'kay? Don't believe me? Try writing a better version of it - really. Then show it to all your friends - judges, players, and newbies - and take your lumps, as they point out all the holes you missed… :)

There's a fair bit of TL;DR to this post, so here's the short version:
+ we work very hard to craft the best policy for EVERYONE who plays;
+ we greatly appreciate feedback*
+ we know our work will never be “done”

Thanks! – Scott M

* - constructive feedback is, obviously, preferred; we know that some just have to vent, and we respect that, too.

Was there ever an O on the Pyreheart Wolf scenario?